In the pharmaceutical field, it is known to manufacture a filling machine of the type comprising a conveying device to sequentially move forward a plurality of bottles along a given path and through a filling station; and a dosing device mounted in the filling station to feed a given number of solid forms into each bottle.
The dosing device is mounted over a rectilinear segment of the bottle path, and has a plurality of feeding channels, which extend along respective parallel, vertical containing planes aligned with each other, and each comprise a respective, substantially horizontal vibrating inlet portion, and a respective, substantially vertical outlet portion suited to discharge the solid forms received from the vibrating inlet portion into the corresponding bottle.
The machine further comprises a counting device comprising, in turn, for each feeding channel, a respective sensor suited to detect the passage of each solid form along the corresponding outlet portion, and an electronic control unit, connected to the sensors for calculating the total number of solid forms moved forward along the outlet portion of each feeding channel and stopping the corresponding vibrating inlet portion when a given threshold value is reached.
Since the bottles are moved forward by the conveying device in an intermittent manner underneath the feeding channels of the dosing device, the productivity of filling machines of the above-described known type is relatively low.
Furthermore, the known filling machines of the above-described type are relatively complex and costly because they imply an intermittent operation of the vibrating inlet portions, which must be alternately activated to allow the solid forms to drop into the corresponding outlet portions and deactivated in response to a signal from the counting device, so as to stop the solid forms from falling into the corresponding outlet portions and to ensure the correct filling of the bottles arranged each time in the filling station.